Task of the Week: Vertebra

The city center of Münster provides several different tasks as one can notice within the portal map. Also in the trail around the Aasee, Münster presents itself from a various mathematical side.

Aufgabe: Vertebra (Task Number: 4096).

The work of art by Henry Moore created in 1974 represents several idealized vertebrae. These vertebrae are deliberately close, yet unconnected to each other. Imagine, they were being put together and seen as part of an adult’s human spine. In reality, an average vertebra of a 1.80 m adult is about 2 cm long. Guess how big a giant would be whose spine would consist of vertebrae of this size (in m).

In this task, especially estimation and modelling are forced. Through the detail on the relation of body size and size of a human vertebra in the task, the size of the vertebra can be determined as an object of reference. An adequate measurement and calculation by means of the realtion results the questioned size.